Tag: workwear

Workwear’s influence on high fashion is one of those trends that required a few spins on the fashion turntable before its real impact has taken hold. For one, it needed to shrug off the associations of the overly-earnest workwear enthusiast, or more recent re-treads of such classic looks being rehashed as “heritage”. Extending London’s menswear runways’ current love affair with the boys from the blackstuff, at Kenzo in Paris yesterday the workwear/industrial aesthetic was blown up to new proportions with a three-dimensional sense of fun typical of Humberto Leon and Carol Lim’s vision. Balanced by a solid palette of greys, black and brown, accented with acid lime (shouting as loudly as hazard tape) and orchid purples, familiar shapes such as tough steelworker bombers, factory-floor shirt-jackets and straight legged pants were given an avant-garde twist. Of particular note were the tailored … Read More »

Boys keep swinging: Duckie Brown’s SS14 collection doesn’t skirt around the issue of what men can wear.

Duckie Brown today played up to their reputation for being New York’s premier experimentalists in the form of menswear. And playing is the right word to use, not in the sense of being pointlessly frivolous but in the idea of a childlike refusal to accept rules as rules and to continuously test boundaries, especially when it comes to what can be worn and by whom. In the opening moments, a spoken word soundtrack, voiced by children, expressed the arbitrariness of male and female dress codes and their impact on aspirations and identities, a sentiment later underlined by the lyrics of some driving adult-vocalled hip hop.